rejection – Words Deferred

Year of Short Stories — Week #37

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 18 (9 personalized)

The Subs and the Pubs

Last week, Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch came back to me, so this week I sent them out again–one to a publisher that usually responds in a few days, and one that typically takes more than a month. Luckily, I snuck this submission in right at the end of their quarterly deadline. I’m hoping that will make the response slightly faster.

Tom, Dick, and Larry also came back, with one of those odd rejections that mostly sounds like a form letter, but has just enough specificity that I suspect it’s not. The end result is the same, but these editors don’t seem to understand that I have to categorize the response for my stats!

The Edits

I continued to trim Red Eyes, shaving another hundred words off, and making a few other adjustments. I’m hoping I can trim around 400 more in this round of edits, to get it down to about 6,000 words.

I logged back into Critters.org after taking several months off. I’m several critiques behind, so I’m planning to do a couple per week to get caught up. I’ll need to get my ratio to 75% again by the time Red Eyes goes out for critique. Since it takes several weeks to get a story through the queue, and I haven’t submitted it yet, I should have plenty of time.

Goals for Next Week

Trim Red Eyes to 6,000 words
Finish 2 critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #35 and 36

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 22 (8 personalized)

Doubling Up

I missed last week’s post, so I’m doing a twofer this week. The upside is that I have more news to talk about. After a long period of slow responses, I received updates on five submissions.

Responses

Two of the responses I received were form rejections for drabbles. This isn’t too surprising since I “shotgun” submitted these, and I feel like they’re long-shots outside a very few specialized flash fiction publications.

The other three responses were for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. I was a little disappointed by the Dr. Clipboard form rejection. This was for a contest run by a magazine that had given me a “close, but no cigar” rejection on another story. It’s also the first submission I’ve actually paid for, with significant cash prizes on the line.

Bluefinch received one rote form rejection, and one very nice personalized rejection that said it had made it to the final round of consideration. It’s not as nice as an acceptance, but that kind of positive feedback from a pro-payment market at least gives me confidence that the story is solid.

With those responses, Bluefinch and Dr. Clipboard are freed up for submission once again, and I will be sending them out in the next couple days.

Perspective

After the long silent period, these rejections felt worse than usual. An important part of the process of submitting short fiction this year has been building up a tolerance for rejection. It never feels good to have a story rejected, but you get used to it by repeated exposure.

I think one reason so many authors don’t submit their work or choose an indie/self-publishing route is to avoid rejection. If you don’t ask, you can’t be told “no.” If you throw that e-book on Amazon and nobody buys it, that doesn’t feel good, but it’s still different from someone explicitly and directly telling you they don’t want it.

Every route in publishing is hard, and it seems likely that anyone who perseveres in the industry is either masochistic or has a screw loose. I think I’m probably the latter.

I checked Duotrope’s statistics for the contest where I received the rejection. All 14 submissions by Duotrope members were rejected. Only one even got a personalized response.

So far this year, I have a <5% acceptance rate on my story submissions. That sounds pretty bad. And yet, when I go to that Duotrope dashboard, I see this little notice:

Being good isn’t enough. You need perseverance too.

Work in Progress

In my last update, I talked about focusing on one story in an effort to get something done on my works in progress. I’ve been focusing on the story Red Eyes, to try to get it fit for Critters critique.

I spent a good amount of time completely rewriting a scene that wasn’t working, and I’m happy with the result. I also fixed a few smaller issues. The main challenge, however, is that it’s still quite long. I trimmed about 400 words through tiny cuts throughout, but it’s still almost 6700 words.

I reverse-engineered an outline of the eleven (!!!) scenes and their word counts, so I can see where the bulk of the story is. This is an interesting exercise, because some scenes definitely felt longer or shorter than they actually are. I plan to take at least one more general pass through the entire story and then focus on several of the longer sections to find places to trim.

Goals for Next Week

Submit Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch again
Continue Editing Red Eyes

Year of Short Stories — Week #25

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections This Year – 14 (7 personalized)

A Month Of Responses

As I mentioned in my previous post, I took a writing break in June, so my works in progress are still in progress. I haven’t sent anything new out, but I did receive several responses.

For “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” I received a very positive personalized rejection, indicating I had gotten past several rounds of evaluation. This confirms to me that the story is solid, and this is a publication I should keep in mind for future submissions.

“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug,” received a rather strange rejection that was generally positive about the story, but concluded that it didn’t fit the editors’ definition of the fantasy genre. To my sensibilities, it’s more of a modern fantasy or new weird story, but this response makes me think it might be worth trying some “softer” sci-fi magazines as well.

“The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” received a form rejection.

My drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Larry,” has the distinction of being the first submission of the year that didn’t get a response at all. A few magazines state in their submission guidelines that they won’t respond for rejections, but this was not one of them. It’s possible that the story got lost in the shuffle, or the response was eaten by internet goblins or spam filters. I’ll be sending a query to see if I can get a clear response.

Goals for Next Week

Send a query to get the status of “Tom, Dick, and Larry”
Re-send all the stories that came back to me
Get back into the writing groove and work on at least one short story

Year of Short Stories — Week #19 and #20

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions Past Two Weeks – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Rejections This Year – 11 (4 personalized)

This week is the last week of school, so my kids are keeping me busy with concerts and events. I’m also packing and getting everything set up to move house next week. Once again I’ve been slacking on my short story reports, so we’re doubling up this week and last.

Submissions

My first submission for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk came back with a rejection, so I sent it back out. This was my only submission for the week, although a few other stories should be coming back soon, if the duotrope estimates are anything to go by.

Writing

I finally completed a draft of Red Eyes, a story that I revived from the trunk, although it’s still a pretty big mess. This pass was mostly to find the core of the story and assess what the big, structural problems are. Now I need to take some time to decide how those things should be fixed. I also need to make it shorter, because this story is awfully long.

I’ve been doing a lot of revision lately. This is a good thing, because it’s one of my weaker points and I want to get better. However, too much revision makes me feel like I’m churning on the same stories, so I’m planning to shift focus to fresh stories for a week or two. The first of these will be Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, which I’ve been talking about for a while, but not really working on.

I intend to knock out a half-assed draft just to get a feel for where I want to go with it. Hopefully that will leave me feeling refreshed and ready to tackle more revisions.

Goals for Next Week

Rough draft of Portrait.

Year of Short Stories — Week #14

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 8 (3 personalized)

Critiques and Rejections

This week, I finished what I started last week and caught up on my Critters critiques.

While not as exciting as an acceptance, I did receive two more personalized rejections in the past two weeks—one from a bigger publication, and one somewhat smaller. Still, it’s always nice when an editor says they want to see more of your work.

Finishing the Finch

I continued to edit “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” this week, incorporating all the feedback. I initially thought these would be relatively small, but in the end I found a few bigger changes to make, including a new ending.

For the third week in a row, I think I’m almost done. I’m going to let the story sit for a few days and come back to it with fresh eyes before doing the (hopefully) final cleanup.

Goals for Next Week

Send out “Bluefinch”
Get back to work on “Red Eyes”

Year of Short Stories — Week #13

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections This Year – 7 (2 personal)

Critique Week

I received great feedback on The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk, but I always under-estimate how long it will take to incorporate so much feedback. There won’t be any major changes, but I haven’t gotten through all the edits yet.

Once again, it’s clear that stories just over 2000 words get the best response on Critters. Anything shorter only counts for half credit, and people are naturally drawn to shorter stories because it’s the least amount of effort. It’s unfortunate for longer stories, but longer stories are also a lot tougher to sell, so it makes sense to subtly encourage tight word counts.

I’m still surprised, when I receive critiques, to see just how differently people can read the same short story. There’s always at least one response that completely misses a major plot point that everyone else got, and this time, I also got another response saying that the exact same plot point was too obvious.

As mentioned last week, I also submitted a lot of critiques. I didn’t quite get my ratio back up to 100%, but I’m very close.

My 100-word mini-story, Tom, Dick, and Derek came back to me again, with a personalized rejection. I suppose one nice thing about markets that specialize in microfiction is that they can churn through the slush pile relatively fast.

I’ll be sending it out again in the upcoming week, although I’m a little less sure about how well it fits the next couple of publications on my list.

Goals for Next Week

Finish revising Bluefinch
Send out Bluefinch and Tom, Dick, and Derek

Year of Short Stories — Week #9

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 5 (1 personal)

Stories in Progress

This week, I had a single incredibly fast rejection—coming back in less than two days. This is not a small publication either, so that’s quite impressive. It’s interesting how much variation there is—some places ask you to give them 90 days to respond!

I edited “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk,” which was a fairly quick process. Now it’s in the Critters queue for critique (and on my kitchen counter for my in-house readers). I’ll come back to it later in the month, when I have all that feedback in hand.

Unfortunately, the next old story I’m working on is considerably larger and rougher around the edges. It’s almost 7,000 words, which is getting into territory that will limit the places I can submit it. If possible, I’d like to chop it down to less than 5,000, but I’m not yet sure if that’s something I can manage. It may require some architectural changes.

I’ve got a busy few days coming up, so I fully expect that those edits will take up my writing time for the next two weeks.

Goals for Next Week

Major reconstructive surgery on the story tentatively titled “Red Eyes.”

Reblog: Acceptance Rates — Aeryn Rudel

Earlier this week, I mentioned personalized rejections. Lo and behold, Aeryn Rudel, the rejectomancer himself, recently provided a timely post about acceptance rates, personal rejections, and the editorial thresholds authors have to cross to actually sell a story.

Submission tools like Duotrope and Submission Grinder provide some rough statistics for reported acceptance rates, but even these have low sample sizes, and inevitably suffer from some systemic inaccuracies.

However you slice them, the numbers are daunting, with hundreds—or even thousands—of submissions being whittled down to only a handful of acceptances. This is the cruel math of short fiction publication. It’s nice to get some perspective from someone who has been submitting a lot of short fiction for years, and is kind enough to share his experience with the rest of us.

Recently, I was discussing the chances of getting published at some of the big genre markets with my author pals, and a few numbers were thrown around, some by yours truly. These numbers were mostly guess-work. None of us really know the exact percentage chance we’ll make it out of the slush pile and onto the editor’s desk, to say nothing of our chances of actually getting published. Then I remembered a few markets had actually told me how close I’d gotten to publication in their rejections, relating my near miss in terms of percentages.

Check out the rest over at Aeryn Rudel’s Rejectomancy…

Year of Short Stories —Week #8

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 4 (1 personal)

Let’s Get Personal

Two stories returned to me this week, both rejections. No problem; I’m developing that thick skin that’s needed for short story submissions. I get a story back, I send it out again, and I keep working on the next thing.

I was pleased to note that one of these rejections was “personal.” If you’re not familiar, there is a bit of a spectrum of rejections for short fiction. The typical rejection response says something to the effect of “Thank you for submitting, we read it and we decided to pass. Good luck elsewhere.” Short, polite, clearly uninterested. There’s really no useful information you can glean from a rejection like this. They might have hated it, or thought it was just okay. Because there are so many people submitting fiction, the vast majority of responses fall into this category, usually upwards of 90%.

However, many publications also have slightly more encouraging variations on rejection. These are usually along the lines of “We liked your story, but we have to reject it anyway.” That may mean that some editors/readers liked it and others didn’t, or that they liked it, but not as much as other stories. Unfortunately, the nature of the business is that a magazine will often have more good stories than they can publish.

A personal rejection is still not a sale, but it’s nice to have a magazine with pretty good pay rates (and thus, lots of submissions) telling me that they’d like to see more of my work.

Delving Into the Trunk

As I mentioned last week, I decided to open up my metaphorical trunk of old stories. It was fun to go back and look at how many stories I’ve written over the years. Not surprisingly, there are a number of these old short stories that are just not very good. They’ll be staying in the trunk. However, I was also surprised to discover several old stories that held up pretty well. In fact, I found three stories that I think are worth dusting off.

Admittedly, these stories need some work. I like to think that my skills are still steadily improving, and I immediately identified some opportunities to make these stories better. Two of them are too long and need better endings. Those will take a fair amount of effort. But the shortest one just needs some polishing.

That first old story is called “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk,” and I’ve already done one editing pass. I’ll probably do one or two more in the upcoming week, put it in the Critters queue for critique, and start hacking one of the bigger stories down to a manageable size.

I’m happy that I dug up these old stories, because one of my current weaknesses is my ability to edit. This gives me an opportunity to work on that.

Developing a System

It’s still the first quarter of the year, and I feel like I’m just beginning to hit my stride in this project. So far, I am really enjoying it, far more than I thought I would. There is a joyous momentum to writing and submitting short stories that is just not present when writing a novel. A novel requires so much focus for so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember what life was like before you began the project, and hard to believe that it will someday end.

Writing short stories is a kind of willful amnesia. It’s a burst of intense focus to make a little thing as perfect as possible, and then it goes out into the world to meet its fate. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it will fail. In the meantime, I get to make something completely different.

Researching markets and submitting stories might sound like an unpleasant distraction to writers who want to focus completely on craft, but I’m finding the logistics of submissions interesting as well. Even with tools like Duotrope or Submission Grinder, it’s a surprising amount of work to find the “best” fit for a given story, especially when you’re optimizing for themes and pay rates. I haven’t even dealt with simultaneous submissions or publications that ask you to wait some amount of time before submitting something else. It’s a lot to track.

Right now, I’m still figuring out what’s important and what isn’t, and each submission feels like a new little adventure. Eventually, I expect to develop a rhythm, and I’ll find that I’m carrying out the same tasks for each submission. When I get to that comfort level, I’ll write a post describing that process, and hopefully it will save some new author a little bit of effort when they decide they want to start submitting their own short stories.

Goals for Next Week

Get a draft of “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” ready for critique.
Start editing another old story, tentatively titled “Red Eyes.”

Year of Short Stories —Week #5

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Total Rejections – 2

(I doubt anyone is setting their watch to my blog posts, but I wanted to note that I’ll be shifting these updates to Mondays, which fits better with my writing schedule.)

Second Rejection

This week marked my second rejection of the year, a response for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been out for about three weeks. I’ve now had one rejection for each story I’m submitting, which feels like a small milestone.

I’m learning to batch the effort of finding publications for a story by jotting down several options, so that when the story comes back to me, I can send it off again with less downtime.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

After a couple weeks where I felt I wasn’t getting much done on this story, I tried to buckle down and get these revisions done. I even took a day off my day job to sneak in some extra writing time.

Revision is hard to quantify, especially with short stories. There are no word count quotas or chapters to measure progress against. I definitely get more done when I can set specific, measurable goals.

To that end, I made a checklist of problems to resolve and went through them one by one. Most of these items involved adding words, so the final step will be to trim, trim, trim.

So, as I suspected last week, I didn’t manage to finish. However, I’m close, and I should be done before the next update.

Goals For Next Week

Finish and submit Pleasant Hills
Start a new short story